The Tenacity of Darkness: Book # 2 of A Thorn for Miss R.

by Sakiv Koch

  “Don’t put your pea of a brain to trouble, beggar!” Roop barked at him. “We know what we have to do!”

  Meera and Radha hummed loudly and began to admonish Kalicharan in a perfectly coordinated chorus. I realized, with a sensation of self-loathing, that a deluge of sweat had drenched me, its odor overpowering the half-a-bottle of perfume I had poured over myself that morning.

  At some level, I now wanted Kalicharan to end this dangerous charade. At another, more significant level, I wanted him to carry it on, to reinforce it to the extent it became reality. Whenever Kalicharan opened his mouth, I saw a dark mass of unborn words ready to take shape, tumble out, and establish the truth of my being a false king, a false man, a nobody.

  But those horrible embryos never took birth. The scarecrow continued to leer, the princess continued to sneer, and the twins continued to jeer. As for me, I continued to offer prayers to the reigning deity of deception. There was no way I was going to sit and dine at Princess Roop’s table. I didn’t know the first thing about Royalty’s table etiquette.

  There was another thing making me want to bolt from there: although I was wearing my best clothes, Roop and the twins were casting odd glances at my attire. I was certain of suffering a heart attack if I were to continue to pose as my employer.

  “Feeling a bit unwell,” I said in a weak voice. “Don’t feel like eating anything. We must beg your grace’s permission to leave your grace’s presence,” I added, doing my best to sound genuinely high-class by being as verbose as I could.

  I felt extremely disappointed at Roop’s cold indifference to whether I stayed or left. She didn’t give a hoot one way or another, and she made no efforts to hide the fact of her not giving a hoot one way or another.

  Kalicharan nudged me once again. He always managed to do it surreptitiously somehow, because an ordinary man digging his elbow into a king’s side would look extraordinarily odd. His patent wink always accompanied his sly nudge. The nudge-wink combination this time around required me to look at an animal grazing at the border of the clearing. Roop and the twins were looking at it, too.

  The animal—a doe—stopped grazing suddenly. It stopped grazing because it stopped living. It stopped living because its head exploded. Its head exploded because Meera-Radha probably had starving children to feed at their home. The twins put two small-caliber revolvers back into their holsters, hidden neatly in the voluminous folds of their dupattas. They had to be excellent markswomen to have hit something so small from such a distance in such weak light. And they obviously doubled as their princess’s bodyguards.

  Would you think me a cowardly creature, brothers and sisters, if I told you that I literally jumped at the sound of the gunshots? I gasped (euphemism for screaming) in fright when I saw the dead doe. Do I need to remind anyone that a very short period of time had elapsed since I had seen a similar animal killed in a similar fashion in a similar clearing? I’m sure you haven’t forgotten Lt. Shakti’s tragic killing alongside that other doe’s killing. Such traumatic replays of tragedy jolt you as much as the original tragedy, if not more.

  “You look sick and pale,” the princess addressed me in a tone rippling with a strong undercurrent of mockery. “You should take some medicine and some rest before leaving.”

  A sick joy (that she exhibited any kind of concern for me), a healthy sadness (that she saw me as a weak, easily frightened man), a quaking excitement (that if I stayed, I could get to spend more time with her), and a steady terror (that I shall be found out) filled me at her advice.

  It’s mostly the terror that wins these kinds of battles. The sight of the slaughtered doe being dragged away by two of the musicians deepened that unpleasant sensation. And then a light broke in upon the swirling darkness of my fear. I suddenly understood that what was happening in that place was an elaborate joke. And the butt of the joke: Neel.

  The princess knows that I am not Sanjay, I realized with grim certainty. This sly scarecrow, Kalicharan, knows that Roop knows that I am not a king. They are a team and I am their plaything tonight.

  “We regret our inability to comply with your grace’s wish tonight,” I said, addressing Roop directly, emboldened by my wounded ego to meet her high-voltage, disdainful gaze. “We shall revisit Lal Nagar soon and avail ourselves of the privilege and honor of your grace’s esteemed hospitality.”

  Roop shrugged, further injuring my bloodied (and non-existent) dignity, which she then embalmed (a bit) the next moment by carrying out a cursory curtsy. You love the game, don’t you? I asked her, but only in my mind.

  Kalicharan nudged-winked for the last time on that memorable night, at a moment when the three women were turning away from us. I suppressed a powerful urge to break his face with a powerful blow and looked at the thing he was pointing at with his pointy chin.

  It was a rosebush. I love the game, too, I told myself brashly, strode toward the bush, and plucked the reddest rose from the bush. I then overtook the princess with a couple of long strides and presented the flower to her. She accepted it with a bejeweled hand so beautiful the fresh rose looked wilted in comparison.

  She smiled and curtsied! I bowed reverentially. We parted. This parting was one of those uncanny things that give you relief and grief in equal measures. Kalicharan and I retraced our steps over the wooden bridge spanning the lotus pond and reached the edge of the clearing in another minute. I turned to take a last look at that spell-binding woman.

  The firelight caressed her from her toes to her head. She had raised the hem of her lehnga to the middle of her sculptured shins. Her dainty feet were bare. Her right foot was engaged in crushing my rose. She appeared to be dancing slowly, twisting, twisting that beauty-crushing beauty that was her foot.

  She lifted her eyes and met my hungry, hurting gaze. She laughed unabashedly. No tinge of embarrassment anywhere. She didn’t even drop the lehnga to cover her gift-grinding foot.

  Chapter 7: The Hues of Blood

  A n adolescent fog lay roiling on the ground. It thickened until it blanketed everything to the extent you couldn’t tell one direction from another. The Phantom moved like a blinded thing. The twin beams of its headlamps smoked and curled uselessly in front of the windshield.

  I glanced at Maha-pandit Kalicharan. He sat peering at nothing, his gaze floating somewhere in his inner world. An ever-so-slight smile lounged upon his lips, which he smacked from time to time, kissing imaginary things, simultaneously caressing the selfsame things. His gestures were hilarious and disgusting in equal parts.

  Refraining from punching his head with all my might took all my might. My hand was aching from being bunched into a tight fist for a long time. I hadn’t struck him so far because there was a small island of gratitude in the vast lake of my rage. He had made me a toy for the princess, yes (the reason of my rage, of course), but hadn’t he brought about the opportunity for me to behold her, to interact with her the way I had beheld her and interacted with her? This once-in-a-lifetime experience felt priceless to me, even if it were never to be repeated. The thrill it had given me was immeasurable and immortal—it would always throb and pulse in my forever-electrified nerves. And then there was the possibility, however small and dangerous, of Kalicharan taking me back to her one day! If they were willing to carry on the farcical pretense, so was their friend Neel.

  “She doesn’t know,” Kalicharan said, breaking in upon my madly swirling thoughts.

  “What?” I snarled, not sure if I had heard him right.

  “The princess doesn’t know,” Kalicharan elaborated. His eyes shone redly in that darkness, like a beast’s, detracting from the already-weak elements of his sincerity and truthfulness. My heart quickened the rate of its beating nonetheless.

  “What doesn’t she know?” I ventured, pretending not to have caught the meaning of his (false) statement.

  “That you are not King Sanjay,” Kalicharan said with a chuckle. “She has never seen Sanjay, neither in person nor in a picture or portrait.”

 
“Liar.”

  “I am not lying.”

  “These royal people mingle with each other from their infancies. How could they not have come across each other at some wedding or coronation or hunting expedition?”

  “Because her royal highness has lived abroad all her life,” Kalicharan said. “She left India when she was three years old and she returned to her birthplace less than a month ago. This fact is easily verifiable. You can ram your horrible fist into my handsome face if you find this information incorrect in any way or manner.”

  I said nothing in response. But my body responded to this fact in a way I would rather not mention here (being a shy guy).

  Kalicharan chuckled and banged his palms together—the said involuntary response hadn’t escaped that devil’s smoldering eyes.

  “Kill it!” he bellowed, disconcerting me, deflating my spirit and the other thing.

  “Kill what?” I bellowed back, stung and humiliated, pretending that what had just been killed had never come into existence in the first place.

  “Kill the engine,” said Kalicharan. “Stop the motorcar before you bang into trees or fall into a ditch in this impenetrable fog. You can’t damage the king’s motorcar! You are not the king!”

  I stopped the precious Rolls Royce with a jolt of fear for its safety. A single scratch anywhere on its pristine body could dent my career seriously.

  “But you are the king!” the naughty man said, reemploying the nudging-winking combination that had thankfully been in abeyance for the last couple of hours. “Aren’t you?”

  My hand twitched around the ignition key. The engine muttered, spluttered, and went back to sleep as my non-kingly fingers went limp. The dense fog billowing all around us in the dead of the night made me feel as though I were afloat, rudderless and clueless, in a sea—stranded with a naughty madman for company.

  The motorcar’s cabin light burned bravely in that endless, milky darkness. Kalicharan started dozing and snoring after a few minutes, smacking his bloated lips in an extremely disgusting manner from time to time. A patchwork of colors pulsated in front of my eyes.

  I glimpsed Roop’s foot and ankle once again. She stood crushing my rose. The hem of her lehnga kept rising, ever so slowly, in my feverishly vivid imagination. My goggling eyes were ready to pop out of my head by the time her knees came into view. My breathing shortened as I leaned forward. The phenomenon I was too shy to speak about above recurred now—with much greater alacrity and force this time around.

  “Isn’t she the juiciest, tastiest, sweetest, and spiciest thing imaginable?” the emaciated pandit asked in his cracked baritone, shattering my waking dream, assassinating my lifelike fantasy. His spurious snoring had ceased and his burning eyes had snapped open. Repulsive sounds of chewing, chomping, licking, swallowing, and slurping emanated from his grinning mouth.

  My response to his vulgar, objectifying question was a punch thrown at his brittle jaw. The power behind the blow was calculated to shatter a couple of Kalicharan’s facial bones, to render the sly fox mute for a long time to come. My hand braked to a quivering halt just a millimeter or so short of his momentarily endangered jaw. My mouth was clamped shut so tightly my molars were in danger of exploding like little enamel bombs.

  Kalicharan jerked his head and slammed his face into my fist.

  “Fiery, fiery,” he said and cawed-cawed for a long time. “Bantering and blows aside,” he resumed speaking once he had finished laughing, “I’ve seen many kings, princes, and landlords in my extensive travels all over the world. You, my friend, are Roop’s one true match! Except for me, of course!”

  He smacked his femur and caw-cawed some more, his eyes blazing merrily in his cadaverous face. “It’s a pity you weren’t conceived in some royal womb. That would have granted you easy access to our Roop’s reproductive system. Caw, caw, caw!”

  That strange man had enough black magic in him to make me pity myself during those moments. Why, oh, why, wasn’t I born in some king’s household?

  “You are the king to her!” he declared, divining my thoughts. “I am a king-maker as well as a king-destroyer, like Lord Brahma and Lord Shiva rolled into one.” More caw-caw here. “Your inability to slurp all that spicy sweetness arises not from the humbleness of your origin, but the fact–,” the old villain stopped speaking and opened the motorcar’s door. He stepped out of the Phantom into the ghostly fog, leaving me in dark both literally and figuratively.

  He took a few steps and disappeared from my view as completely as though he had dissolved into the fog, become a part of it. The sound of a little stream of water snapping dried leaves mingled with a song Kalicharan sang in a surprisingly soulful voice. I was dying for him to come back and tell me what he had been about to tell me. But as he continued to contaminate the local soil for a remarkably long time, I, too, felt a strong urge to cleanse the self-same soil by blessing it with my own water.

  I exited the warm cabin of that king of vehicles and stepped a couple of yards away to carry out my business. I was performing the extraction part of the said business when someone came up behind me and wrapped a muscular arm around my throat. A man is unimaginably vulnerable while he is emptying his bladder. His reflexes become sluggish, and his strength turns watery. I thank God to this day that I hadn’t gotten to that point of vulnerability yet. It was less than half a second away, and I am additionally thankful that I didn’t wet my trousers in that sudden onset of fear.

  I tried to free myself, but the man holding me was incredibly strong. Kalicharan was still singing at a little distance. I shouted, but a massive hand clamped over my mouth, blocking my scream.

  “Don’t struggle and don’t make a sound,” a silky voice murmured in my ear. “Unless you wouldn’t mind getting your throat slit from ear to ear.” Cold steel caressed my beloved neck to underscore the warning. I needed to gulp, but it’s a very hard thing to do when a razor-sharp blade is grazing your throat. Not to gulp when you need to gulp is an equally hard thing. You begin to choke, which compounds your panic, which in turn makes you suffocate and gasp more acutely.

  But a new, deeper panic gripped me just then. One of the Phantom’s doors had opened and slammed shut! It wasn’t Kalicharan who had gotten in. He was still standing at the spot he had been occupying for the past minute. He had finished passing water, but he hadn’t finished his song yet. He sang as though he had forgotten everything other than his music.

  Someone else had gotten into that purloined temple of mobility, that priceless royal vehicle. It wasn’t mine to have brought it here to this jungle. It was worth five dozen Neels, with all their and their parents’ worldly possessions put together! Its engine started with a muted roar. Its headlamps diffused a smoky, ghostly glow in the air.

  “Hey, hey,” Kalicharan bellowed, forced to leave the very last line of his song unsung. “You can’t leave without me! Stop, Neel–Aargh!”

  The sound of flesh striking flesh filled the air. Someone had just slapped someone. Kalicharan’s scream confirmed that he had been at the receiving end of the massive blow. I vicariously felt the impact and agony of that slap on Kalicharan’s bony face.

  The Rolls was departing slowly, taking with it my rising career, my (fake but critical) honor, the chance of my going to Toronto with the king, and the possibility of any future interactions with Princess Roop (the last of these felt the most galling to me). I was mortally afraid of the man holding the knife to my throat. My long-suffering bladder rebelled against the weak force I exerted over it to keep its contents in place. I was scared to the point of whimpering like a bewildered child.

  But a tremendous fury gathered in the core of my being. It ate up my terror and brought out the fourteen-year-old Neel who had killed two men and maimed one in the course of one night. If you ever find yourself in this superlatively unenvious position and you have a suicidal rage driving you to get out of the said situation, you have to do three things in perfect synchronization to minimize your rather high chances of being cu
t wide open in a place no less critical than your throat:

  a) lift your right leg at least two feet high

  b) at the same, exact split second, grab your attacker’s knife arm in a double grip with all your heart and soul’s strength (bodily strength alone might not suffice to save you)

  c) strike your attacker’s shinbone with your boot heel and throw yourself back with a mighty jerk while pulling the knife-holding hand away from your body.

  I carried out all the above-listed steps with perfection, but I still got nicked. The cut leaked enough blood to convince me my end had arrived. A tragic, premature end. A crass injustice. The bereft, inconsolably wailing faces of Ma and Rachna materialized in front of my horror-widened eyes. My fantasy flew further—it showed me the imperial face of Princess Roop next. She was full of disdain even in my imagination, but an incongruous stream of tears fell from one almond-shaped eye.

  The Rolls had rolled to a stop a few meters away, where it stood idling placidly. The diffused light from its headlamps provided just enough illumination to see things in a dim, ethereal, dreamlike way. There was no further sound from Kalicharan. In the meantime, in exchange for the little incision in the skin of my neck, I had dug my sturdy boot’s heel into my attacker’s shin so viciously I had probably cracked his bone. The back of my skull rammed into his face. He gasped and staggered back.

  I turned to face him. Fights aren’t won by the stronger, bigger, or even the more courageous person. Like music or art, one has (or doesn’t have) an innate faculty for combative abilities, which can be further honed with practice and/or training. I had inherited this talent from my father—a master fighter—and spent countless hours under his tutelage in the pursuit of perfection. But, unfortunately, Silky Voice appeared equally (if not more) gifted and accomplished in this respect.

  He recovered his balance and his stance incredibly quickly. The expert way in which he held his knife chilled my spine.